We are two episodes into Tip Toe, but already we know how the Channel 4 drama will end: with Leo, a gay bar owner played by Alan Cumming, murdered, hanged from a lamp post outside his own house. “It’s a clear statement of intent,” says the show’s creator, Russell T Davies, of why he chose to open every episode with the shocking, violent denouement. “There’s no tricks. We are remorselessly heading towards this event.”
Tip Toe is Davies’s first drama for Channel 4 since 2021’s triumphant It’s a Sin, the bold, heartbreaking tale of young queer people living through the Aids crisis in 80s London. In this new five-parter, the action is brought right up to the modern day in Manchester, where Leo and his neighbour Clive (David Morrissey) are finding their lives increasingly intertwined.
Despite having lived next to each other for the past 15 years, the men had barely interacted until that fateful morning in episode one, when Leo was locked out of his house in his underpants and had to ask Clive – a hardened, masculine and homophobic electrician – for help. And so began the fall of dominoes that would eventually lead to Leo’s lynching.
It’s been reported that Davies was inspired by the rise of Reform and Nigel Farage’s rhetoric to write Tip Toe, but that’s only a fraction of the truth. “They are just mouthpieces for any cause they can grab hold of. It was the online world generally really,” he says. “All Reform does is listen to what people are saying on X, whether it’s ‘we hate women’ or ‘we hate farmers’.” Davies hates the way the online conversation has spun out of control so much that when he worked with the BBC on Doctor Who, he demanded that they stop publicising the show on X.
